Clinging to the Wreckage
by Rhyolight04
Summary: You don't always want what you need. Not part of anything else, a fragment in the post-Reichenbach void.


I may have had one too many. I know I didn't have enough to find the pub floor plunging like the deck of a foundering ship under my feet, and then to be in and out of awareness in huge splinters, sensation without comprehension. Then: no transition at all, I'm all the way back, I'm here, I can't see—I think it's dark— and I am biting hard into someone's pectoralis major. The left. It's a man, we are naked, and I am not trying to get away. Not that kind of grappling. I am snarlingly, horrifyingly aroused. So is whoever I am holding down against the bed, his nails currently digging into my arse.

"Fuck," I say, an expression of the same kind as 'What the hell?' or 'Who am I and how did I get here?'

"Yes. Hard," says my…partner.

"No, wait a minute," I say, panting. The nails stop pulsing into me. My body is disappointed.

"Bad time you choose to come out of it," and I recognise the voice, even without the layers of indifference, of actual ennui. "I can give you another dose if you don't want the responsibility for…completing my rape."

I really like the way I slap him without having to think about it. "You don't get to _think_ that word. _I_ was drugged; I'm the one who never was even asked for consent."

"Oh, right, Dr. Watson, I forgot your chivalrous streak." His hand, the one whose arm I'm not pinning down, is wandering over my buttocks. "My brother found the only other man in the world who would parse semantics in a moment of passion. Better matched than I realised."

"And you don't get to talk about _him_."

"Would it make you angry enough to continue? Is there something I can say that would make you take me apart the way you were, with your teeth and your hands and your nails—" his hand and his nails are squeezing, dipping, holding my hips down. I want to grind into him; hell, I know what I want, and it's not what I do-but I want to nail him to the mattress until he screams, until I scream—

Mycroft raises his head and bites the side of my neck, ripping a gasp out of me, and scratches hard down my back. It's already bruised and scratched and it hurts and I want, I want— so I bite him back, and when he tries to get his arm free I let him, settle for holding his hips hard down on the bed and letting his hands pass all over me, strong and for once unsubtle, gentle enough on my cock but almost painful everywhere else— ow! not almost.

"What do I need to do to get you off your lead, to get your nice kindly mind back out of the way? It's the killer I want, John, I'm not asking you for gentleness or love or understanding—"

"You're an idiot, Mycroft." I move my hand to his throat. "One hand—here, just a little harder— and you're dead, which is not even a little bit arousing to me—"

"But this is," he says, reaching.

Ah, Christ, yes—, oh again—

and then, with his other hand, he does something to a bundle of nerves in my healthy shoulder that whites me out in pain for a fraction of the time I'm in pleasure. That arm of his goes back, pinned next to his head.

"And don't fucking try to rewire me," I say, digging my fingers into the part of his chest I've bitten, pinching his nipple hard. He jolts beneath me. It feels so good. I put my hand down between us, hold our erections along one another but no, it's too intimate, and whatever this is it's not anything I want to remember if I'm ever with someone I love. Maybe I do want another taste of his drug. Maybe I want to leave—

He runs his thumb from my nipple to my groin, gripping me and flicking the tip, glazing me, bringing his wet thumb back to my nipple, not gentle, not painful (so good), and thrusts against me. We rock that way, clumsy, strong. I don't like him. My body really doesn't care about that, it wants to rub and ripple against him, demand and thrust and suck and pound. My hands are wired closer to my heart, I think, and they want to caress and treasure and be tender. Neither he nor I want that; he wants teeth, not tongue.

"Why this, Mycroft? " He shudders as I move my hand along his ribs. "You could have anyone you want, I think, why choose someone who hates you?"

"Do you?"

"I would have said so. And probably again tomorrow." Can I hate anyone in the dark, whose body moves this way with mine? I can feel him digging into me, pushing against my thighs. Open them? Keep them tight? So good to feel, to match my strength and my desire against someone who wants me.

"'All power tends to corrupt;' I think the only honest relationships I can have are coercive, now. You're laughing—"

"'Philosophy in the bedroom,' something closer to what you want?"

"Nothing so mannered or puerile." Mycroft exhales harshly and relaxes. "Let me go, please?"

"No more shiatsu?"

"I want to hold you. If I may."

"You're _asking_?"

"You're not running?"

"It's the middle of the night, Mycroft, and someone has kidnapped me for rough sex— no, nothing so clean—for drugged mindless coercive rutting; accused me of debating semantics in bed; demonstrated he can probably do almost as much damage as I can almost as fast; and then gone off on a tangent about sexual politics and good taste." _I know whose brother you are. And I know the hunger of arms and hands and cocks and lips and hearts._ "Do you want me to hold you?"

"Please don't make me ask." And he kisses some of the bites on my neck, gently, sad and desperate and wanting. The wanting is hotter than hell, but I have to know before I let my mind slough away again.

"You have to say, you haven't said-why me?"

He takes his mouth off my collarbone. "Because I think I've killed my brother and you're the only person who deserves to hurt me for it. The only person who hurts as much as I do." And he bites my collarbone, hard, and pokes the nerve-bundle in my shoulder again but even physical pain doesn't quite white out the break in my heart.

When I can speak again, I tell him. "If you try that again, I will dislocate your thumb so badly you will hurt, significantly, multiple times a day, for possibly the rest of your life. It won't be sexual. I don't think that's what you're looking for. My inner commando isn't the man you want here. Understand?"

He nods against my chest. I suddenly wonder if the man he wants here is Irene Adler, which would be completely typical of my life and the most fucked-up family in the English-speaking world. Fortunately, he's had her killed. Or not.

"I don't do Dom/Sub stuff because I don't want to, but you really should look into it," I tell him.

"Artificial. Boring," he says faintly and my heart trips. Of all the times to see a resemblance.

"And I don't do sex for pain; maybe along with, but not as the main reason. Will you shape up and act like a human?" _instead of the very annoying bureaucrat-spymaster we both know you really are?_ "And don't push me, because it will send me out of this bed instead of over the edge you want. Go slow, and be careful with the teeth."

For two people who don't like one another we can do very well. If he wants hard and fast he can wait through slow and sweet.

"Why are you being kind?" he asks.

"Because I think you're the only person who hurts as much as I do."


End file.
